Tag Archives: South Asia

Earlier this year, a group of Indian analysts and policymakers released [PDF] Non-Alignment 2.0: a foreign and strategic policy for India in the twenty first century, arguing thatthat India “must seek to achieve a situation where no other state is in a position to exercise undue influence on us – or make us act against our better judgement and will”. (p10)

The report was (surprisingly) liberal internationalist in its economics, Asianist on security, stridently navalist in its military outlook, pragmatic on the question of where India ought to stand in relation to the United States and China, and carefully assertive on how and when India should use force.

On Asia:

It is in our interest that China remains preoccupied with its first-tier, more immediate maritime theatre. The retention of strong U.S. maritime deployments in the Asia-Pacific theatre, a more proactive and assertive Japanese naval force projection, and a build-up of the naval capabilities of such key littoral states as Indonesia, Australia and Vietnam: all may help delay, if not deter, the projection of Chinese naval power in the Indian Ocean.

We need to use this window of opportunity to build up our own naval capabilities. Our regional diplomacy should support this approach by fostering closer relations with these ‘countervailing’ powers. This should include a network of security cooperation agreements with these states and regular naval exercises with them. (pp13-4)

On Pakistan:

We should also be prepared—in the event of a major terrorist attack—to send a political signal to the Pakistan Army. The idea would be to instill a measure of caution and make them think hard before allowing another attack in the future. We have, in the past, resorted to controlled application of force across the Line of Control. Going forward, we need to move away from the notion of capturing and holding territory (however limited) to conducting effective stand-off punitive operations. (p19)

On the Middle East or West Asia:

[W]e need to carefully distinguish between the emerging Islamist political forces and jihadi terrorist organizations like the Al Qaeda and its affiliates. In the past, there has been intense rivalry between them and alliances have usually been tactical and short-lived. We must be ready to work with Islamist groups that have entered the political mainstream in their countries and are competing by legitimate means to enter government.

But we should also be clear that their hold on power will be contested by institutions that have existed long before the democratic turn in these countries. Some of these institutions will be important to us in securing and stepping-up cooperation on security-related activities like counter-terrorism and intelligence. (p23)

On balancing:

Given that India has more interests in ‘direct’ competition with China, and less with the U.S., it may be tempting to conclude that the U.S. is a likely alliance partner. But this conclusion would be premature. While there may appear to be attractions for India to exploit its derivative value, the risk is that its relations with the U.S. could become a casualty of any tactical upswing in Sino-American ties. Nor is it entirely clear how the U.S. might actually respond if China posed a threat to India’s interests. The other potential downside is that India could prematurely antagonize China … The U.S. can be too demanding in its friendship and resentful of other attachments India might pursue. The historical record of the United States bears out that powers that form formal alliances with it have tended to see an erosion of their strategic autonomy. (p32, emphasis added)

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Writing in The Caravan magazine, I reflected on how the report was received, and whether both the critics and proponents of an “upgraded” non-alignment might have missed some of the conceptual difficulties associated with it:

The critics immediately leapt on the [Non-Alignment 2.0] report—and particularly its title, perhaps missing some of the playfulness of its choice. Bharat Karnad, among the fiercest of India’s hyper-nationalists, rubbished the whole thing as “an exercise to force the present into a conceptual policy straitjacket from the past”. Two former national security advisers, Brajesh Mishra and MK Narayanan, and the incumbent, Shiv Shankar Menon, suggested that they found the term non-alignment to be a dangerous anachronism. Tom Wright, a South Asia correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, damned it as something pulled out the “dustbin of history”

…

However, the problem with framing Indian foreign policy debates around the language of alignment versus non-alignment, or borrowed versus indigenous strategic thinking, is that these terms are becoming emptied of meaning. Not only are they coming to represent inchoate prejudices rather than careful strategic thought, but it’s also unclear whether they capture important dimensions of India’s strategic circumstances. Two questions are especially important. The first is about the realistic parameters of non-alignment. The second concerns the demands of alignment.

On the burdens of non-alignment – the issue of what an “erosion of … strategic autonomy” might actually mean:

What is certain is that India is already aligned—with various powers, in various ways, and certainly to an increasing degree with the United States. But if complete autonomy is illusory, the perceived and projected demands of alignment—let alone alliance—have probably been overstated. The problem comes when we conceive of alignment as a distributive problem.

In this imagining, Indian diplomatic largesse is something to be apportioned in zero-sum fashion among a fixed set of partners. If the US wins, Russia loses. If Iran is up, the US is down. Ironically, pro-Indian factions in Washington and anti-American ideologues in Delhi share this simplistic framework.

So do others, like Brajesh Mishra, one of the architects of the US-India rapprochement in the previous Bharatiya Janata Party-led Indian government. Mishra, speaking at the launch of Non-Alignment 2.0, declared that “once you join [the] US, there is no non-alignment.”

This is historically untenable.

And, finally, an electoral metaphor for the future of Indian strategy:

India’s fractious politics suggest a useful metaphor. In parliamentary democracies, smaller parties can enter into a coalition—or they can offer a ‘confidence and supply’ agreement, the promise to support a bigger party in individual pieces of legislation on a case-by-case basis.

Indian foreign policy is accommodating to the country’s expanding strategic horizons and new capabilities. Expect it to shun the coalition, but offer deepening confidence and supply to the United States.

One could slap a label on this—but, as veteran columnist AG Noorani observed some years ago, “non-alignment is … a non. It no more indicates how a country pursues its interests than calling a person non-married indicates how he or she pursues happiness.”

In January, Seminar magazine, an always-interesting Indian monthly, published a retrospective on 2011. Two essays – by C. Raja Mohan, and Srinath Raghavan – stood out. Both looked at Indian’s foreign, security and economic policies in the subcontinent.

In Modernizing the Raj Legacy, C. Raja Mohan wrote on the continuity between the strategic principles of British and independent India:

First, an ‘Inner Line’ delineated the limits of fully administered sovereignty of the Raj. (Embedded within it were the barely sovereign princely states). Second, beyond the Inner Line, the Raj drew an Outer Line [including FATA and] Arunachal Pradesh … At a third level, the Raj constructed a system of protectorates and buffer states that were formally sovereign but bound to the Raj in a treaty system in a manner that excluded the influence of Britain’s rival great powers from Europe.

Nehru’s adoption of this framework:

The much touted ‘Nehruvian’ foreign policy did not shirk the Raj legacy … The first four treaties that independent India entered into were with Bhutan, Sikkim, Nepal and Afghanistan. The first three agreements were variants of the Raj treaties with these states in the 19th century. As China entered Tibet, Nehru moved quickly to consolidate the traditional security arrangements with the three Himalayan kingdoms … Nehru found no contradiction between his high minded idealism at the global level and pragmatic realism at the regional level.

India’s influence in its near abroad naturally waned during the Cold War because of India’s economic isolation and China’s rising influence, but

[i]n the intervening decades, India did indeed affirm the Raj legacy. Indira Gandhi liberated Bangladesh [in 1971], integrated Sikkim [in 1975], and proclaimed the so-called Indira doctrine of India’s regional primacy. In the 1980s, Rajiv Gandhi sought to discipline the King of Nepal – who was flirting with China – by ordering a trade blockade, used force to secure the Maldives against a coup [in 1988], and inserted the Indian military into Sri Lanka [during 1987-1990] in order to keep peace between Tamils and the Sinhalese

Taken together, Delhi’s recent agreements for partnership with Bhutan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan and Maldives mark a significant effort to reconstitute India’s neighbourhood policy. Unlike in the recent past, India is not claiming primacy in the region as a divine right. Instead, it is offering genuine partnerships to its neighbours premised on sovereign equality and mutual benefit. In doing so India is modernizing the Raj legacy and making it relevant to our time

Srinath Raghavan, in another excellent essay, explains that ‘the open doors of South Asia turned on two hinges: Afghanistan in the West and Burma in the East’, both of which swung shut after independence:

South Asia is amongst the least integrated regions of the world. Official intra-regional trade, to take but one indicator, hovers around 5% of total trade of the countries of the region. This is abysmally low not just in comparison to other regions of Asia (the corresponding figure for East Asia is over 50%), but also when contrasted with its own potential for growth through trade. South Asia has three attributes that make it extremely well-suited for integration by trade: the highest population density in the world, linguistic and ethnic overlap across borders, and the presence of a large number of cities close to the borders.

Raghavan concludes that

[t]he time, then, may be propitious not only to press ahead towards economic integration within South Asia, but also to try and weld the subcontinent with South East Asia, and possibly West Asia … it is clear that India needs to get its act together.

Finally, Kanti Bajpai has an essay on Sino-Indian relations. It’s less historically-textured, but collects some useful figures:

The energy picture also suggests that India and China could come into conflict. Global energy needs will rise by 50% by 2030, half of it from India and China. China is already the world’s largest energy consumer. Per capita energy use in India will grow by 56-67% and in China by 60-67%. Oil accounts for about 25% of India’s total energy use. This will rise to 35% in 2030. Over 60% of India’s oil comes from the Gulf, Iran, and other Middle Eastern sources. India’s reliance on coal is 42% of its total energy use. Its shortfall of coal is likely to be 100 million metric tons by 2012. Oil accounts for roughly 20% of China’s total energy use. This is expected to rise to 24% in 2030. Its reliance on coal is nearly 70% of its total energy use. Demand for coal in China is growing rapidly and will be six billion tons in 2025. Natural gas use will also increase substantially in both cases.

In a major paper dated April 26, 1942, [the British colonial administrator Olaf Caroe] wrote that “a realisation is needed in the highest places that India cannot build a constitution unless the frontiers are held and the ring fence in some manner kept standing”. It was entitled “Whither India’s Foreign Policy”. Two others he wrote bear mention. They are “Some Constitutional Reflections on the Landward Security of the India of the Future” (August 18, 1944) and “The Essential Interests of the British Commonwealth in the Persian Gulf and its Coastal States, with special reference to India” (1944).

Caroe’s ideas may be showing up in Mohan’s work, but what’s interesting is that Caroe’s colleagues (and, today, Noorani) did not agree:

Brobst takes the reader through Caroe’s theories on “India’s Outer Ring”, the Buffer System, much of which became irrelevant after Independence. Guy Wint was much more realistic than Caroe. Advances in military technology and the rise in air power had undermined the traditional role of the buffer states. He wrote on June 7, 1943, a paper entitled “Some Problems of India’s Security”, in which he pointed out that just “as Louis XIV, when his grandson ascended the throne of Spain, remarked that the Pyranees had ceased to exist, so today have the Hindu Kush virtually ceased”.

The irony is that Pakistan is, for India, a quite serious buffer against the northwest – just not in a way that seems especially desirable in light of the pathologies of the regional economic architecture described by Srinath Raghavan.